Beyond the fringe
An alternative is to hold an annual fair or festival, which almost every city in the world now seems to be doing in some form. Edinburgh, however, may have milked the cultural variety as successfully as any city. Founded in 1947, the main festival has spawned sub-festivals for books, films and television, not to mention a host of fringe events. It is widely imitated.
Yet neither buildings nor events are guaranteed to pay off, either financially or in terms of pleasing the citizenry. The series of Maggie's centres being built for cancer patients near hospitals in British cities shows that small functional buildings can be well designed and aesthetically satisfying (all are the work of well-known architects). But many people value the character of old neighbourhoods, whether architecturally notable or not.
Modern cities tend to look alike. Cheap housing seems to mean identical blocks built of concrete. And even more expensive buildings tend to be constructed to run-of-the-mill designs. No wonder that swathes of Seoul look like swathes of São Paulo and swathes of Shanghai. Even the most ambitious buildings, many designed by trophy architects who flit from one country to the next, often seem alien to their context. Dubai's Burj Al Arab hotel, which is meant to resemble a giant dhow, may have visual echoes of local history. But the City of London's gigantic Gherkin is as in or out of place there as it would be anywhere else. The same could be said of the Roppongi Hills centre in Tokyo, François Mitterrand's national library in Paris or countless buildings elsewhere.
Most cities in rich countries, with honourable exceptions, have been wanton in tearing down buildings, domestic, commercial and public, that were built to a human scale and reflected local history. Tokyo has been vandalised. More damage was visited on Britain's cities by architects and planners in the 1950s and 1960s than by all the German bombing in the second world war. Unfortunately, similar mistakes are being repeated in the fast-growing cities of Africa and Asia, where the stock of old buildings is often smaller.
Shanghai has allowed block upon block of distinctive red-brick tenements to be demolished, just as Beijing has let developers destroy the courtyard houses of its hutong neighbourhoods. Mumbai has been exemplary in listing for preservation most of its notable old buildings—it has some of the best Victorian architecture in the world—but is still destroying chawls, the single-room tenemented buildings that give the city so much of its proletarian character. Even Mecca is tearing down its heritage, including the house in which the Prophet Muhammad was born, to make way for nondescript developments.
People want all sorts of things from their neighbourhood. As the urban iconoclast Jane Jacobs said, they want the untidiness that comes with having houses close to workplaces, shops next to flats, and rich next to poor. They also want a balance between privacy and the opportunity of chance, or planned, encounter. But none of that need mean ugliness. Cities, after all, still have spiritual needs to satisfy.
